Benefits of Creating a Positive Onboarding Experience

Fortunately, any organization can get better at new employee onboarding and provisioning (even those that already avoid most of the worst onboarding mistakes in our last post). And there’s a big payoff for making the investment in improving processes and implementing supporting technology. Among the benefits of doing onboarding and it provisioning effectively:

• New employees who go through a structured onboarding program are 58% more likely to be with the organization after three years. [Quora]
• 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experienced great onboarding. [Quora]
• Best-in-class companies are 35% more likely to begin onboarding processes before day one. [Quora]
• Manager satisfaction increases by 20% when their employees have formal onboarding training. [Quora]
• Companies that focus on onboarding retain 50% more new employees than companies that don’t. [Business News Daily]
• Standardized onboarding also results in a 50% increase in productivity. [Business News Daily]

We’ve covered what bad onboarding looks like. So what makes for an excellent onboarding experience? The competitive and operational advantages of a well-organized onboarding program are not only compelling, they offer a significant and tangible return on investment.

How to Deliver a Remarkable Onboarding and Provisioning Experience

Giving new employees a positive story to tell about their onboarding process requires collaboration between HR, IT leadership, and the hiring manager, backed by technology that enables and supports this collaboration.

It starts immediately after the employee is hired — well before their first actual day on the job — and continues for at least three months. Here are best practices for creating an effective and positive onboarding and provisioning experience.

• Before the official start date, get as much “preboarding” done as possible: employment agreement, drug tests, background checks, payroll information, benefits selection — anything and everything that can possibly be done before day one.
• Digitize as much of the preboarding process as possible. Convert manual, paper-based processes to online forms to improve life for everyone! It reduces time and effort for HR, simplifies the new employee process workflow, makes the organization look innovative, ensures compliance and security and reduces preboarding costs.
• No later than a week before the new employee’s start date, make sure there is:
  • a workspace assigned to them
  • a laptop configured with the software they will need to use
  • an email account setup
  • a network login
  • a list of passwords or instructions for setting up system access.
• For an extra-special first day, assemble a “welcome kit” that can include a variety of branded company swag and snacks, and put it in the new employee’s workspace. 
• Create a complete itinerary for the first day (actually, this should be a fairly standard process, tweakable as needed for specific roles). Communicate the itinerary to the employee the week prior to their start date so they know what to expect on day one. It should begin with who will greet them on arrival. Normally, this is the hiring manager, and we recommend having a back-up individual assigned in case something goes wrong.
  • Include details of what to expect within their first week and month on the job, along with “norms, values, and unwritten rules that create the firm’s identity in the marketplace.” [Thinkwise]
• On their first day, allow the employee to get familiar with their workspace and equipment. Schedule a lunch with their manager or, even better, their teammates. Provide them with their new access badge.
  • Having a workspace “set up and ready is more important than many think.” [Quora]. It creates a positive first impression of your organization (you have your act together), reinforces their decision to join your company, and enables them to start being productive quickly.
• Give new employees opportunities for quick wins with low-hanging fruit and allow room for failure so they can grow from day one. [CIO]
• Provide any necessary training. Videos and online tools work fine, but make sure the materials are up to date. Don’t rely on the new employee to ask questions; they don’t know what they don’t know.
• If your organization uses a lot of acronyms, give the new employee an online cheat sheet listing these. Ask them to add any acronyms they hear being used that aren’t already on the sheet (to help keep it complete and up to date). Though these acronyms are second nature to you, new employees likely don’t know all of them.
• Assign someone (most commonly the hiring manager) to explain the following to the new employee:

1. The expectations of their role and what success metrics will be used to measure their performance; 
2. How their role fits within the broader organization, its operations, and its objectives — plus why this is so important; and 
3. What they need to know about company culture.

• Within the first couple weeks, introduce them to as many of the people they will be working with as possible, both inside and outside their department. Let them know whom to ask about what.
• Optionally, involve them in a team-building activity. This is a great way to get to really know co-workers in a fun, non-threatening environment.

That’s a lot of to-do items. To help manage all of this in an efficient, practical way, organizations should consider implementing a workflow automation platform and portal that integrates with back-end systems across the company. It automates as many tasks as possible while systematically orchestrating the pieces we humans have to do.

With the Kinetic Platform solution, your new hires have all of the equipment and systems access they need to accelerate speed to productivity. Best of all, our platform provides visibility into the status of every request: if it’s completed, and if not, where things are at.

The Kinetic Platform is a powerful orchestration engine that manages provisioning tasks to help make new employees productive more quickly. It does this by centralizing the needed inputs from hiring managers, coordinating tasks across departments and providing visibility throughout the entire process.

The Best Employee Onboarding Experiences

To close on a positive note, just as employees have shared some of their worst onboarding experiences (see our previous post) online, they’ve also shared examples of their best onboarding adventures. Here are a few stories to inspire you. [Bravado]

“(The company) coordinated a whole day with a chauffeur to take me to the lawyer’s office to review and sign paperwork, then to get headshots taken, have lunch with company owners, and finally to the office where my desk had a Yeti full of my favorite beer along with a fully provisioned PC waiting for me.”

“The first day I arrived, I met with my direct manager who gave me a building tour, introduced me to as many people as possible, and got the boring HR policy (details) out of the way before we started on training. My computer was already set up with all the logins I needed and my office was clean and ready to go.”

“(The company) sent me a dope care package to get my tech stuff, and I joined right during their sales kick-off event, so it was a great week of hearing from the highest levels of senior leadership and getting fat using Uber Eats gift cards daily.”

The Bottom Line

Throughout this blog series, we’ve examined the impact of great onboarding and provisioning on four different segments. Arguably, the fourth and final audience — the employee — is likely the most impacted. It’s why getting employee provisioning and onboarding right the first time is vital to the growth of your business.

Talk with Us to find out how Kinetic Data solves the provisioning problem for your organization, regardless of the business unit.